Wounded Magic

by Megan Crewe

  His smile came back, wry this time. “I check on her every year or two, because I feel a little responsible for her. She’s happily working as a nurse in Albany now.”

  Her memory loss was probably for the best, he said. I caught my hands before they could clench. He didn’t have any idea that my memory had nearly been wiped as well, did he? Would he be furious about that if he knew, or just shrug it off?

  Dad reached to squeeze my shoulder. “All I’m trying to say is… Right and wrong are a lot more complicated than they often seem when you’re seventeen. And you have to pick your battles. Do I agree with every choice the Circle makes? No. But now that I’ve had so many dealings with the Dull leadership myself, I understand much better why your granduncle is so cautious. If the Dulls ever turned on us en masse… There are tens of thousands more of them than there are of us. I fought for us to expose our differences to the wider world so we could help those outside our community, and you know that transition left your grandfather dead and hurt or killed dozens of other mages. The last thing I want is for that movement to lead to the end of us.”

  I’d heard fellow mages talk about the need for caution when it came to the Dulls many times before, but after everything I’d seen in the last few months, it’d become difficult to imagine them being more of a threat to us than our own leaders. I studied his face. “Do you really think the Dulls would try to wipe us out?”

  “If there’s one thing humans have in abundance, it’s the ability to fear that which they don’t understand and to turn that fear into violence,” Dad said. “You know I push back against any policies I disagree with, Finn. But I believe that any uncomfortable decisions the Circle makes, they make with the security of our entire community in mind. We can’t undermine that when we don’t have enough information to fully understand the fallout that might result.”

  I had that information, at least when it came to the Champions. I just couldn’t give it to him. The ’chantment gripped my tongue until I let go of the urge to propel the secret out. Instead, I motioned to my Burnout mark. “What good reason could they have for branding people like me like this?”

  He brushed his fingers over my hair in an affectionate gesture. “I’m sure there are fears tied up in it to do with dissidence and uncertain loyalties,” he said. “But, you know, it also claims you as one of us. You’d have no way to prove to anyone who didn’t know you that you’re a mage by demonstrating magic. The mark proves you had magic once.”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I wasn’t sure I liked thinking about it that way, as if it were some sort of feeble replacement for what they’d taken from me. Was there some positive spin the Circle would have used to justify the Exam, their special ops teams, and all the rest of it?

  Even if they could justify it, just a smidgen, with an appeal to the security of our community, was it right even then to force mages like Rocío to make that sacrifice for the rest of us?

  “I want you to stand up for what you believe in, Finn,” Dad added. “I just don’t want you to rush into any battles so quickly that someone gets hurt despite your best intentions. Especially when that someone could be you. Remember, est modus in rebus.”

  There is a middle ground, he meant. Under his scrutiny, I had to nod. He couldn’t have called the League’s activities simple teenage rebellion. Most of the members weren’t even teenagers anymore. It was clear, though, that Dad valued caution over passion these days. Perhaps if I could have told him everything I knew, he’d have stood up with me… but I couldn’t.

  My hand dropped to my thigh, my thumb tracing the line of my new keychain through the fabric of my jeans. A different question wriggled its way out of my belly. Rocío had been worried there’d be backlash against our relationship. The least I could do was discover if any would come from within my own home.

  “I met a girl too,” I said. “Not Dull—not by a long shot—but new magic. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Dad blinked. “Of course not,” he said. “Even if she were Dull, it wouldn’t matter now—you’d be able to share who you are with her. When do we get to meet this girl?”

  A little of the tension inside me dissipated. “I don’t know,” I said. “She doesn’t have much time for family dinners or whatever at the moment. She made Champion.”

  A shadow crossed Dad’s face, there and then gone, and again I wondered exactly what information he did have. Still, the fond expression he summoned afterward looked genuine enough. “Well, I look forward to getting to know her. Whenever she is free from her responsibilities, whenever you’re ready, you should invite her over.”

  Imagining Rocío in our vast polished dining room brought a flutter of pleasure into my chest that I hadn’t expected. The girl could conjure dragons with scales like jewels. She belonged here as much as she did anywhere else.

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “And let me know if you turn up any volunteer possibilities that look promising. I’ll keep my ears perked too.”

  Dad gave me one last pat on the shoulder and stood up. I waited until I heard the faint creaking of old hardwood as he descended the stairs. Then I scooted my chair over to the bookshelf against the wall by my desk.

  His admission had stirred up another idea he probably hadn’t intended. He’d once taught a nonmagical girl magic when she wasn’t even supposed to know it existed. Compared to that, what I’d like to do wasn’t anywhere near as scandalous.

  “It’s barbaric,” Luis said to the reporter. The voices of the crowd still milling on the street outside the college warbled around us, but not loudly enough to diminish our leader’s confident tone. Only a couple of the news outlets Tamara had reached out to had arrived to cover the protest, but Luis was making the most of what chance he had for the public’s ear. I hung back behind several of the other members, close enough to hear the interview but beyond the range of the camera.

  “We’re talking about government-sanctioned mutilation here,” Luis went on. “Would we accept officials cutting out a teenager’s eyes because they didn’t meet some arbitrary standard of skill? Slicing out their tongue? Of course not. Maybe only a small percentage of human beings have the ability to hearken magic, but for those of us who do, it’s as much a part of us as any other sense. So why do we allow the practices of Dampering and burning out to continue?”

  “Exactly,” Tamara put in where she was standing beside him. “The lucky ones come here to the college to put their magical ability to use, picking their career paths and dreaming of great futures, while the rest of us are left with only a shadow, if any, of the talent that used to be ours. It’s time to address that huge injustice.”

  “And to remind them we’ve still got some power,” Ary murmured from where she was standing behind Tamara, just quietly enough for the reporter to miss her words.

  She might have resented that we hadn’t demonstrated our defiance her way, but our first show of opposition had gone better than I could have hoped, negligible media presence notwithstanding. The two hundred or so of us who’d shown up early this morning had held the college’s entrances until almost noon before the security team had managed to displace us.

  The cold November wind had given me ample excuse to keep my hat pulled low and my coat’s collar high, and I hadn’t heard a single former classmate shout my name, though I’d caught a glimpse of a few I recognized meandering aimlessly along the sidewalk. A fair number of Dull spectators had stopped to observe us by the time we’d been ousted too.

  Mark squeezed through the crowd on the sidewalk and knuckled my upper arm. “We really pulled it off, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah.” A smile split my face. Change seemed to hum in the air, as potent as the magic had once been to me, and I’d been a part of conjuring it. “And this is just our opening move.”

  “It figures you’d already be planning our next project when the first one isn’t even done.” Mark shook his head, his mohawk swaying with the movement, but he was smiling a little too.

/>   As the news crew headed back to their van, the protestors and our audience began to disperse. Floyd and a few of the other League members I’d been sitting near this morning walked by, a couple of them pausing to salute me. I glanced around, my fingers closing around the strap of my shoulder bag. Noemi hadn’t left yet, had she? I’d wanted to wait until after the protest to pass on my somewhat delicate cargo.

  There she was, wolfing down a hot dog from the stand across the street. I clapped Mark on the back and headed over to her.

  “Hey,” I said, motioning for her to follow me farther away from the others. “I brought something I thought you might like to borrow for a bit. You just have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about it—not even Luis—and keep it out of sight. All right?”

  Noemi wrinkled her nose at me in mock-dismay at my prohibiting Luis, but her dark eyebrows had leapt up to the fringe of her pixie cut. She swallowed the rest of her hotdog and wiped her hands with a paper napkin. “With a pitch like that, how can I say no? I won’t get you into trouble. Believe me, my parents don’t know half the stuff I’ve been up to. I can keep a secret.”

  I trusted that she could, or I wouldn’t have been doing this. I fished the leather-bound volume out of my bag and passed it to her quickly. An almost reverent look came over her face as she grabbed it and tucked it into her purse before anyone else could notice the exchange.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “One of the most renowned texts on mental exercises to develop a mage’s connection to the magic,” I said. “We learn the basic methods in the academies, but this one goes far beyond that. I think it’s the one that helped me the most, as much as any of them did. You mentioned you were curious about those strategies… Technically it belongs to my parents, though. Very limited edition.”

  “And they wouldn’t be happy about you lending it to some Dull?” Noemi said dryly.

  She sounded as if she were making fun of the idea, but that basically summed it up. If I’d passed the book on to Prisha or one of my other classmates a year ago, Dad and Mom would have made some noise about making sure we got it back for the family collection—I knew they’d gone to some expense to track down a private copy for my use—but they wouldn’t have minded otherwise. If they found out I was sharing it with someone who wasn’t even part of the mage community…

  They’d pretend they were only concerned about proper care being taken, but really, the idea of someone nonmagical reading our texts would make even them twitchy. If Granduncle Raymond ever found out, I might as well head straight to Tartarus, the way he’d come down on me.

  None of them would know, though, because Noemi would take care. Possibly we’d have made a lot more progress building friendly relations with nonmagical folk if we’d been more open to letting them study alongside us from the start.

  “That’s the gist of it,” I said.

  Noemi patted her purse. “Well, thank you. Tons. You have no idea how much I’ve been dying to pore over any of the mage writings. I promise I’ll return it in pristine condition.” She did a brief but giddy little dance on the sidewalk. “Oh my God!”

  I had to grin at her excitement. “Let me know if you see anything in there you think is particularly intriguing,” I said. “It can’t hurt those of us in the know to get a fresh perspective.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rocío

  I forced myself to sit still in the small white room, even though my skin crawled with the urge to move. To get out of here somehow. The blank white walls and the sparse furniture—the hard-backed chair I sat on and the two matching ones on the other side of the glossy white table—reminded me too much of the Exam building. The faint drone of the air filtration system didn’t exactly improve the atmosphere.

  I knew the Confed wasn’t going to send me into more trials. That wouldn’t make any sense at all. But the totally illogical fear scrabbled at the back of my mind, insisting they might toss me back into that maze of barbed hedges at any moment.

  The men who’d grabbed me off the street outside my apartment had escorted me straight here without a word, staying quiet through all my questions about why they wanted me and what might have gone wrong. They’d led me to this room and left me in it, locking the door behind them. At least an hour must have passed, but no one else had come.

  I was debating getting up and pounding on the door to see if that would bring someone, when the lock clicked over. Even though I’d been waiting for just that, I tensed. I didn’t delude myself that I was here for a friendly chat.

  A burly man and a hook-nosed woman stepped inside, both of them looking to be in their fifties and both wearing the same black-trimmed moss-green uniforms that Commander Revett and a couple of the other higher officials usually wore. The jacket had the Confed’s crest at the collar, but also another on the right shoulder: an image like two feathered wings embracing a yellow spiral. Magic swift and concealed, Hamlin had told us during training. It was the emblem of the special ops division.

  “Operative Lopez,” the man said. “It seems we need to have a talk.”

  “Great,” I said. “Here I am.”

  I’d tried to keep my tone even, but a little snarkiness must have slipped in anyway. The woman gave me a sharp look before she and her colleague took the chairs across from me. They sat in silence for long enough that I started to squirm inwardly.

  “You’ve been with the Confederation’s Special Operations Force for nine weeks now,” the woman said, as if she were consulting an invisible personnel file in front of her. “Four weeks of basic training and five of active duty.”

  Was that a question? When her pause stretched, I said, “That’s true. Can you tell me what this is about? I have no idea why I’m here. I’m supposed to be getting my leave now, and I only—”

  The man held up his hand. I shut my mouth, my fingers curling around the edge of my seat.

  “Your leave has been interrupted due to a matter of international security,” he said. “A report from one of your fellow operatives led us to assess your performance in the field. We’d like to review several incidents with you.”

  A report from a fellow operative. I gritted my teeth. Brandt—it had to be. Not that I was best friends with every other soldier and officer on the base, but he was the only one I’d really clashed with. He’d probably been itching for my first leave to come so he could report me without feeling like he was betraying me right to my face.

  How much could he have told them, really? I couldn’t think of anything that mutinous I’d done, in his presence or not.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  The woman clasped her hands on the tabletop. “Let’s start with your first time in the field and move forward. Is it true that you delayed the completion of a mission to tend to a pre-existing superficial wound for an associate of the Borci Za Spravedlivost?”

  The word “associate” threw me for a few seconds before I figured out what she was talking about. “He was only a kid,” I said. “Younger than me. Scared. I thought if I did something kind for him, he’d be more likely to turn away from their group if they started pushing for his allegiance.”

  “So, you acknowledge that you took that action, beyond the scope of your orders?” the man said in the same flat tone as before.

  “I healed a scrape on his cheek,” I said. “It took less than a minute. My mission leader gave me the go-ahead.”

  They were already moving on as if nothing I said about it mattered. “Your fourth mission, in Orava,” the woman said. “Your mission leader ordered the squad to quickly clear out a building. You delayed while talking to a man there. Is that also correct?”

  Again, the moment had seemed so innocuous at the time that I didn’t recognize what she meant at first. “He tripped and fell down,” I said. “I just asked if he was okay.” But I did remember Brandt yelling for us to hurry up. “Would you really want—”

  “Is. That. Correct?” she interrupted.

  I bit back a grimace
. “Yes, it is.”

  “A couple of weeks later, you ignored the direct instructions of a more senior colleague about how you would handle an explosive ’chantment.”

  “Our orders were to get rid of it,” I said. “I did that. And when I started diffusing it, he hadn’t even told me not to.”

  The man took over. “Your last mission before your leave, you let a young woman who had a clear connection to the insurgents escape.”

  I had to bristle at that accusation. It might have been true, but Brandt didn’t even know that for sure—he’d just assumed I’d gone against orders. “I did go after her,” I said, using the same answer I’d given Sam. “She made it out of the building before I managed to stop her. Besides, she was trying to help us, not them. Do you really think she’d ever help us again if we tackled her like some kind of criminal?”

  The woman sighed. “It isn’t your place to question the tactics we employ. When you accepted the role of Champion, you agreed to serve the Confederation and your country with your skills. That includes following the orders you’re given. I’ve seen a disturbing pattern of defiance and collusion with the enemy.”

  Collusion? Because I’d healed a kid’s scrape and didn’t batter the locals around like Brandt did? ¡Por el amor de Dios! Had he also told them I was loca for the things I’d said about the magic?

  “When I accepted the role of Champion, I—” My throat closed around the next words I’d meant to say. I did grimace then. “You know I can’t even talk about things from back then to explain myself.” There were other ways I could address that point, though—not specific events but my general impressions.